Full Episode Transcript

Roofing Talks Episode 5: Behind the Scenes of a Roof Installation
Host: John May, General Manager, Petrali Roofing
Guest: Charli O’Malley, Production Manager, Petrali Roofing

Introduction

Hey guys, this is John May with Petrali Roofing, General Manager here, and we are here for another exciting episode of Roofing Talks. Roofing Talks is where we come to educate you, the public, our customers, our future customers, on the roofing industry to give you insights, to give you intel, to help you make better informed decisions. Your roof is one of the most important parts of your home. It protects you from the elements, from rain, from hail, from water. And it’s one of the things that is the least understood about the house. And so Roofing Talks is here to help you understand what’s going on up there above your head and to help you make informed decisions.

We’re going to be hearing from Charli O’Malley, our production manager here at Petrali Roofing. And she has a very critical, important role that she plays for us here at Petrali Roofing. So I’m excited to have her here and share a little bit of the inside workings. So I want to start with hearing a little bit about how long you’ve been working at Petrali Roofing, how you came to be an employee here, a little bit about that story.

Charli’s Journey at Petrali Roofing

Charli: I’ve been at Petrali for 8, no, 7 years.

John: 7 years!

Charli: I started when I was 17. I’m still in high school.

John: Awesome!

Charli: I had been working at Chick-fil-A for a little while and it just wasn’t really working for my school schedule. I was wanting to go to Bible college and it just wasn’t going to work out. So I ended up having a very informal interview here. My dad had just started as a salesman, actually. So I talked with Dave and Heidi Petrali and started as a receptionist. And then I’ve just been here ever since and I love the company. I just moved kind of through different roles and ended up as production manager.

John: What are some of the other positions or kind of sort of tasks that you’ve managed and handled at the company?

Charli: Making calls for sure. And then I also did some office stuff. Did a lot of admin, some like quality control stuff, and then I did more production scheduling, and then I worked as one of our office managers assistants, and then some office managing for a little while. And then just ended up in production which I love a lot.

John: Fantastic. We’ll come back to the quality control point that you mentioned there because that’s a really important part of what we do here at Petrali and it’s a big part of Charli’s role with the company. So we’ll come back to that. But give me a high level overview on what it means to be the production manager for Petrali Roofing. What does that entail?

What Does a Production Manager Do?

Charli: That entails, for me, it really just entails taking care of our customers to the best of my ability. I really like to view each of our houses that we do or the roofs that we do as one of my mom’s. Like I imagine my mom’s in the house every time.

John: Oh, high standards!

Charli: Yes. I want her to be happy. So I make sure that we put on the best product, the best crews and the best supervisor to make sure that just everything turns out well and it would be a roof that I want my mom under or me under.

John: Awesome!

Charli: Yeah.

John: Obviously, we’re not doing roofs for your mom every day. That doesn’t happen. But that it’s somebody’s mom that we’re serving or somebody’s daughter that we’re serving. What would my wife, Meredith, want for her to be treated and the quality of the roof? And so it’s an important way to kind of frame the work that we do. So I love that.

From Inspection to Installation

John: Walk us through kind of the process for you from start to finish. One of our roof consultants, like we’ve heard from Jacob McKinnell, we’ve heard from Dan Carlson on some of these other roofing talks. They’ll come out, they’ll do an inspection. They’ll let you know, give you an honest assessment. Your roof has hail damage or your roof is good to go, you don’t need to worry about the condition of it. They’ll give you an honest assessment there. If your roof does need to be repaired they’ll walk you through that an estimate process and work with the insurance company and then once you’re at that point where you’re ready to get a new roof and then it moves over to the production world to Charli’s world give us an overview on what that looks like from start to finish from from your part.

Charli: For me, as soon as I get a roof in my general area, I’m making sure that all of the components on the job are correct so that the contract matches the material orders, that everything aligns. So I’m checking all the details to make sure it’s good to go. And then I start scheduling with the material order and with the roof install day. I’m talking to the crews, I’m talking to the homeowners, and to our supervisors to make sure that everything aligns and everything looks good. So it’s a lot of just checking availability, communicating with the homeowner, communicating with our guys to make sure that we can get everything good to go.

John: Yeah, absolutely. What the customer wants is what the customer is getting. And there’s a lot of pieces, there’s a lot of communication that goes in to make that happen. And Charli kind of sits in the middle of that, of like, all right, this is what the customer wants, this is what we’ve heard from the salesman. Is the order lining up with what’s been submitted?

Charli: It’s kind of being a middleman for everyone and then filling the permits as well and making sure we’re sticking to all the standards that we need to stick to.

Managing Crews, Schedules, and Logistics

John: Absolutely. We are one of the largest roofing companies in the Pikes Peak area, if not the largest, which means that we do a lot of roofs on a daily basis, especially right now. We’re coming into the busy season. There’s a lot of work that’s coming. How do you manage multiple roofs going on a day and a week? There’s a lot of moving parts. How do you approach that and how do you manage that?

Charli: It is a lot. It was really overwhelming at first when I started, especially when we started with all hand-printed or handwritten schedules.

John: Oh my gosh!

Charli: But we’ve improved from there for sure. So it is honestly one of my favorite parts about it because it’s kind of like a game. You have to schedule everything, put everything that’s near each other on the same day. So it’s honestly a lot of fun. But normally I will route all of the installs that we have for the day and then try and assign supervisors and crews to similar areas so that it works out for them. It’s just a lot of checking in with everyone and making sure that the drives aren’t too far and that they can reach all the things that they need to. So it’s it is a little bit of a challenge, especially when we’re busier. But we have enough really good crews and supervisors to make sure that everything goes really smoothly.

John: One of the other challenges is the region that we cover as well. So even like today, there’s a job in Lake George, which is 30 minutes into the mountains past Woodland Park.

Charli: We’ve got one in Pueblo as well today.

John: Yes, absolutely. So there’s lots of juggling even from locations. How do you handle, so the absolute biggest thing that can throw absolute curveballs to your day is weather. So how do you manage that, approach that, and make sure that those risks of weather impacting a roof install are as low as possible?

Roofing in Colorado’s Unpredictable Weather

Charli: I do try and check the weather pretty much every day for the following week, but because we’re in Colorado, that changes also every day. So I will normally check the day before all the installs and I’ll check the regions to see what the weather’s looking like for the installs the next day. And then I’ll also check the morning of and have our team check as well, just to make sure that it doesn’t look like it’s going to rain. If it’s below like a forty percent, we normally are going to be okay. Colorado does like to throw some curveballs sometimes.

John: Yes, it does.

Charli: Normally the morning of is when we’ll make that for sure decision, but we try and check at least a week before.

John: Yeah absolutely. If you are looking for a recommendation for a local weather specialist, tune into Matt Meister and Peaks2Plains Weather. He is a local meteorologist, has been in the area for years and the weather here is erratic to say it best. And so having a local weatherman who knows how it works and what happens and how quickly things can change. Peaks2Plains Weather, Matt Meister, he does a fantastic job. He’s been our go-to.

Quality Control Matters

John: Talk a little bit more about how you ensure quality control on a job, making sure that we’re meeting the standards, the materials are what we want them to be, what the customer expects. So talk a little bit more about managing quality control of all the jobs that you’re managing and coordinating.

Charli: Yeah, I think it starts with when we pull the permit, we’re making sure what we need or if we need mid inspections, what needs to be on the roof or off the roof when we do those. And if it’s over 7,000 ft., which is pretty common in Colorado, it will need some double ice and water felt. So yes, it starts with that.

And then when the materials arrive, we’ll normally have our supervisors checking that it’s the right shingle, the right color. And so I would say the supervisors are probably our main faucet for the quality control. They’ll be on site during the entire install. Unless they’re running a couple, then they’ll be there pretty much the entire day. Just making sure that the roof is being installed correctly, that the shingles and materials are correct, that the customer is happy, whether that’s with their yard or with the nails that fall. They’re keeping up with the cleanup and we also have our Final Touch crew which is awesome and they’ll go by after the install to clean up again and to make sure everything looks good. So it’s a pretty hands-on quality control process, I would say.

John: What is that role and the importance of that role of that supervisor on on side of that day that install?

Why Supervisors Are Essential on Every Job

Charli: Absolutely. The supervisors are key and their role is kind of created out of a gap because a lot of roofing companies don’t have a supervisor on site. And so it’s really hard to actually know what’s going well or what’s going poorly. Especially the homeowners who haven’t really talked to anyone face to face besides the salesman up until that point. So our supervisor really is representing Petrali in that moment. So it’s important that there’s someone that we can actually trust to do that well. And on the day of the install, normally they’re making sure that the crew is installing everything correctly. If the homeowner has any special instructions or cares, or if we’re taking out any vents or putting anything in that they’re doing that correctly. And they’re just really making sure that the work goes well and that the homeowner and their cares are managed well. If they need to take care of any special garden areas or trees, the supervisor is taking care of that and then still making sure that the install goes the way it should.

John: Absolutely! And to your point earlier about your mom…We want to take care of a person’s home, a homeowner’s home, as like we were taking care of our grandma’s home, our mom’s home. So it’s how we want to treat and approach each one of those installs, and those supervisors play an absolutely important role in that.

Communication Is Everything

John: So we’ve mentioned a few different people here in this process. There’s a lot of moving parts. There’s a lot of people that information has to flow through. There’s a roofing consultant, there’s the homeowner, there’s the roofing crew themselves, there’s the supervisor, there’s phone calls to you and the rest of the office team. So how do you manage and approach and handle all of that communication that goes on?

Charli: Yeah, it’s definitely a lot. And I feel like that’s definitely a main part of my role is the communication. And it’s really just checking in with people, whether that’s through a phone call or through text message or through email. Constantly, I would say when the job or the roof install hits my my board, when I start working on it, it’s a lot of emailing and then it moves more into phone calls and texts between the homeowner between the crews between the supervisor and then luckily the supervisor is able to communicate a lot with the homeowner which is really nice

John: I hope the viewers can see the amount of investment on Petrali Roofing, there’s a lot of people that are involved here in this process to in order to do something to a high standard and high quality. If you just would leave this to, let’s say, like a roofing consultant, a salesman, and a roofing crew, there’s less people involved, but there’s things that can be missed, communication that can be missed. Having somebody like Charli in her role, putting all these pieces together and making sure that the information is getting where it needs to be, schedules are being coordinated, times are being coordinated, products are being managed, checking in to make sure that things are being done, that’s an investment.

Having a supervisor on site, that’s an investment from Petrali Roofing. The quality that we are working towards, we’re not by any means perfect, but I think you can see the investment from what Charli is sharing here, that we are doing what we can to go above and beyond to make that experience as top-notch as possible for that that install, that roofing install. It takes a lot and it takes somebody who’s talented like Charli to be able to put these pieces together and make sure all the communication goes out where it needs to go

Advice for Homeowners Choosing a Roofing Contractor

John: From a female perspective how would you help encourage our female viewers so that they can be a bit more confident when either interacting with a roofing company or let’s say there’s a storm, there’s a hail storm that happens and they have concerns about the condition of their roof. What are maybe some recommendations that you would share with your experience? You’ve been around roofing a long time, so what would you share with our female viewers to maybe help them in when it comes to making a decision on replacing their roof?

Charli: That’s a really good question. I think it was definitely a little interesting going into roofing, not knowing anything, especially as a woman. I feel like I have learned a lot. I would say the main thing for me would be to not let anyone pressure you into anything. That’s always a red flag for me. If someone’s trying to pressure you into making a decision, probably not a great decision to make especially as a woman. I feel like people will either try to pressure you into things or try to tell you that they know a lot more than you, which might be the case, but that’s one thing that I like about Petrali is we don’t try and make you feel like you’re less because you don’t know something and so I would say getting a couple different options or different opinions

John: It’s good!

Charli: …doing your own research and just not going with someone that’s trying to pressure you into something, making you pay something right away.

John: Make sure people are respecting you and the decision that you’re making, because if not, then if they’re continuing to press or continue to push, that shows that they don’t they don’t respect the individual that’s in front of them.

What Makes Petrali Roofing Different?

John: So one last question I want to ask you, because you’ve been working here for a long time, 7 years. What, in your opinion, sets Petrali Roofing apart from other companies out there?

Charli: That’s a really good question. And I think that’s why I’ve stayed so long is, it feels wrong to say everything, but I would say like everything! Petrali really does care about the people in the community. It feels really good to work in a construction company, in a roofing company that actually does care.

John: Awesome.

Charli: I feel really good actually telling people that I work at Petrali because of our standard and our care for the community. Our core values are huge. I love that we stand behind our work and just the heart for the people is huge. And I think that’s really what sets us apart. Our quality also is better, like we stand behind our work we go back if we need to, if, and it’s just like everything about us is is great, like it’s a really great place to work and we have good quality good people and um good values.

Final Thoughts and Resources

John: Awesome! Charli, thank you so much for sharing the fantastic insight. I hope our viewers took lots away from that conversation of the ins and outs of the roofing install process. The details that go into that, it’s a lot. And here at Petrali, we care deeply about it and we work very hard to make sure that that process is as smooth as possible for you.

Follow Petrali Roofing on social media, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. We’re all over the internet. Everywhere you can find anything, we’re there. So follow us on social media. Give us a call if you would like a free inspection, 719-375-8773. We do a Free, 21-Point, no pressure inspection. We’ll get up on your roof and we will take that honest assessment, let you know the condition and help you walk through the process if you do in that situation where you might need a new roof.

So give us a call today. Go to our website, petraliroofing.com. We have tons of resources on there as well. Watch our other Roofing Talks videos. They are fantastic, great information, and we’ll see you next time.